The Gunsmoke Drummer Sells a War

If the title of this story does not seem like a Clifford Simak creation, that’s probably because the title was created by someone at Ace-High Western Stories, to whom Cliff sent the story, and who published it in their January 1946 issue. And the magazine’s editor (whose name does not appear on the masthead) apparently liked it well enough to make it the lead story in the issue, giving it top billing on the cover and the first position among the stories inside.

In keeping with his desire to feature characters other than cowboys and Indians in his Westerns, Cliff created his protagonist as a drummer—that is, a peddler, a person who drove a wagon from town to town, carrying goods to sell and performing the occasional service, such as sharpening scissors. But for there to be a story at all, Johnny Harrison had to ride into a bad situation; and he drove his wagon into an effort to take control of the county.

—dww

Chapter One
A Deadly Message

There was no time to draw a gun.

The horseman with the blue shirt and the blue bandana tied across his face simply rode out of the brush that screened the trail and was there, sitting the sorrel, a six-gun in his hand.

Johnny Harrison pulled the team to a halt and sat motionless on the seat of the peddler rig, staring at the man.

The bushes rustled and another man rode out, a man with a red shirt and a blue handkerchief, mounted on a bay horse with a blaze slashed across its face from nose to ears. And then another rustle and another man, big and beefy in a black coat, with red whiskers sticking out beneath the mask.

“Everybody here?” asked Harrison.

The gun tilted in the first man’s hand, belched sudden smoke and thunder. Harrison felt the hat twitch from his head, go rolling in the dust. He fought the startled team to quietness with firm hands on the reins.

“That goes to show you,” the gunman told him, “that we aren’t fooling. So you better listen close.”

“That hat was plumb new, mister,” said Harrison. “It will cost you just ten bucks.”

“He’s got a nice horse tied on behind the wagon,” said the man with the black coat and red whiskers. “We might just as well take it along when we up and leave.”

The first man snarled behind the mask. “Shut up,” he snapped. “And leave the horse alone.” Then he said to Harrison: “We’ve got a little message we’d like you to deliver.”

“Speak your piece,” Harrison said, curtly, “and fork over that ten bucks.”

He was feeling better now, for he knew they wouldn’t kill him. Men who want one to deliver a message don’t shoot the messenger.

“There’s a hombre in jail over at Sundown,” said the man, “that ain’t got no call to be there. You go and see the marshal and tell him this: Tell him that if he don’t turn Jim Westman loose we’ll be over and take care of it ourselves.”

“But …” said Harrison.

“He’ll understand,” the man assured him. “You won’t have to draw no pictures.”

“All right, I’ll tell him first thing I get to town,” Harrison promised. “And now that we got that off our chest, how about some business? Need any pots or pans? Got some …”

The horseman in the black coat spurred forward, big and burly on his shaggy mount, face red with sudden anger.

“You go getting gay,” he shouted, “and we’ll shoot your pans so full of holes you can put them up for sieves.”

“Shut up!” yelled the first man, angrily.

“No stinking peddler can go getting gay with …”

The man’s words broke off and he coughed and swayed jerkily in his saddle. From the barren hilltop that rose like a bald man’s head above the brushy hillside came the snarling chuckle of a high power rifle.

The first man spun his horse around with a vicious hand, raised his six-gun in a flashing arc. From the ridge the rifle coughed and a bumbling thing howled above the men grouped on the trail and crashed into the brush.

On his feet, Harrison fought the rearing team with one hand, clawed for one of his six-guns with the other. A .45 crashed beside the wagon and out of the corner of his eye, Harrison saw the bullet raise a trail of dust clouds as it ground-skipped across the ridge-top.

The rifle spat like an angry cat and the horse of the wounded man bolted, the black-coated rider doubled up in his saddle as if a taloned fist were tearing at his vitals. He bounced like a wobbly sack of oats as the horse tore into the brush and wallowed down the hillside.

The man in the blue shirt followed. The man in the red shirt was already gone. When Harrison cleared his gun the trail was empty. Quieting the maddened team, he stood and listened to the crashing of the underbrush on the hillside far below.

Turning to the ridge above him, he saw two riders angling down toward him. One was tall and skinny as a scarecrow and rode without a hat. The other was broad and solid in the saddle and wore a hat that made up in bulk for the one the other didn’t wear.

“Ma!” Harrison shouted. “Ma Elden!”

Ma Elden shouted back. “You all right, Johnny?”

“They got my hat,” yelled Harrison.

He got down from the rig and waited for them, hunting up his hat, trying to brush off the dirt with an awkward sleeve, staring ruefully at the ragged hole angling through the crown.

“Ten bucks,” he told himself. “Ten whole cartwheels.”

The horses reached the trail and Ma Elden eased herself out of the saddle, waddled heavily forward, hunting in the pocket of her shirt for makings.

“What did they want?” she asked.

“Wanted me to tell Marshal Haynes to turn somebody loose.”

Ma nodded. “Jim Westman. No account rascal. Shot the town up some the other night. Plugged Jack Collins dead center.”

“Kill him?”

“Bet your boots,” said Ma. “Collins wasn’t much good himself and probably wanted killing, but Sundown kind of likes to dish out its own justice. Don’t appreciate foreigners coming in and doing it for them.”

She poured tobacco into a paper, coaxed it into shape.

Harrison spoke to the skinny man still sitting his horse.

“Howdy, Hatless.”

Hatless Joe chuckled softly, tawny mustaches waggling. “Kind of tickled up that pudgy feller some, didn’t I?”

“If he lives,” said Harrison, “it will be a miracle.”

Ma licked the quirly deftly. “Horse thieves,” she said. “Horse thieves, sure as I was born. County’s plumb infested with them.”

Harrison went back to the man in jail. “How come,” he asked, “if this Westman killed a man he isn’t over in the county jail at Rattlesnake?”

Ma snorted. “Cause they’d turn him loose, that’s why. Get the judge all likkered up and load the jury with his friends. That is, if the sheriff didn’t sort of forget and let him go before he ever got to trial. Westman worked for Dunham at the Bar X for a while, then drifted over to Rattlesnake and since then’s been living without visible means of support, if you don’t look too close.”

“The way it is,” said Hatless, “we figure on giving him a fair trial, then take him out and hang him.”

Ma snapped a match across her thumbnail, lit the quirly.

“Westman one of the horse thieves you spoke about?” asked Harrison.

“Could be,” Ma told him. “Don’t rightly know, of course. He’s got all the earmarks, though. Gang’s got its hideout somewhere in the badlands up near Rattlesnake. Been cleaning out the county.”

“Newest thing in stealing,” explained Hatless. “Lifting cows is downright old fashioned now. Horses move faster and bring better prices.”

Harrison nodded gravely. “Been hearing some about it. Most everyone has lost some horses, seems. But folks are so stirred up with this county splitting business that you don’t hear much of any talk but that.”

“It’s about time we got shut of that courthouse bunch up at Rattlesnake,” Ma said, curtly. “Just a bunch of cutthroats. Me, I been working real hard for setting up a new county, so’s we can get some decent government. Trouble is, folks seem to be afraid of Dunham. Him and the Bar X outfit is plumb set against this two county business. Says we’ve got along all right so far, so what’s the sense of changing.”

Hatless guffawed. “Getting along all right the way Dunham wants it. Him with the biggest ranch in the whole dang country and bringing in a batch of men that he don’t need around each election time just so they can vote.”

Ma moved toward the rear of the wagon. “Got a new horse, I see.”

“Picked him up the other day,” Harrison told her. “Come sort of high, but once I laid eyes on him …”

“Yeah, I know,” said Ma. She eyed him closely. “When you going to quit this peddling and get a business of your own?”

“Pretty soon,” Harrison told her. “Figured maybe I’d do it right away and then …”

“And then you saw this horse.”

Harrison grinned. “I call him Satan. Good name for him, don’t you think? Black as night. Best horse I ever saw.”

“The Smith general store at Sundown is up for sale, I hear,” said Ma. “Cheap, too. Jake is figuring on moving farther west. Got an itchy foot.”

“Haven’t got the money, now. Another year or so.”

“Might loan you some,” said Ma.

Hatless chuckled. “She’d do most anything …”

Ma raged at him. “You keep your trap shut, you old buzzard. Ain’t I got trouble enough without you butting into everything I say?”

Harrison put the damaged hat on his head, reached for the reins.

“Thanks for happening along,” he said.

“Was hunting some cows when we heard the shot,” said Hatless. “Figured we’d better see what was going on.”

“You’re coming out to the ranch for Sunday dinner, ain’t you?” asked Ma.

“Sure,” said Harrison. “Always do when I’m around.”

“Carolyn will be home,” Ma told him. “Coming home tonight.”

“All the way from St. Louis,” said Hatless. “She’s been away to school. Mighty fancy …”

“He knows that as well as you do,” Ma snapped.

She said to Harrison: “Sing Lee will have some of that chicken fixed the way you like it. That is, if he’s sober.”

“He’s taken to making his own, now,” said Hatless. “Beats forty rod all hollow. Got to tie it down before you try to drink it.”

Harrison climbed aboard the wagon.

“See you Sunday,” he said.

He clucked to the team and the wagon rolled, canvas flapping in the wind, faint rattle of pans coming from the rear, the one dry wheel screaming in protest.

Two miles from Sundown he overtook the man walking along the trail and leading a horse.

Harrison pulled up the rig.

“What’s the matter, Doc?”

Doc Falconer grinned lop-sidedly. “You don’t know how glad I am to see you.”

He climbed to the seat beside Harrison, set his medicine kit on the floor, holding onto the reins of the horse.

“You and the horse have an argument?” asked Harrison.

“Horse went lame,” explained Doc. “And I didn’t have the heart to ride him. Take it easy, will you. Don’t want to make it harder on him than I have to.”

“Somebody sick?”

Doc shook his head. “Been out to my gold mine, Johnny.”

“You really got a gold mine, Doc?”

Doc Falconer’s eyes squeezed together, making tiny wrinkles of dry humor at their corners.

“Nope, but folks think I have. Figure I got a lot more cash than I really have. Figure nobody could make that much cash just doctoring.”

He squinted along the dusty trail. “Folks should know how little I have just from the way they pay me,” he declared.

The dry clop-clop of the horses’ hoofs sounded like faint, dull explosions in the dust. An insect sang stridently in the limp air of late afternoon. Fall flowers nodded beside the trail.

“When are you going to quit this roving life and settle down?” asked Doc.

“Someday,” said Harrison casting his eyes down.

“That Carolyn is a darn fine girl,” said Doc.

“She’s coming home tonight,” Harrison told him.

“Knew that,” said Doc. “Figured you’d be along.”

He hummed beneath his breath.

“Wonder if you’d do something for me, Johnny?”

“Sure would,” said Harrison. “That is, if I can.”

“Only one around here that could do it,” Doc told him. “Only one that knows enough to keep his mouth shut. Wonder,” said Doc, “if you’d keep a letter for me and forget you ever saw it.”

“Sure,” agreed Harrison.

“I may come and ask you for it,” said Doc, “and again I might not. If I don’t come back in five days or so you mail it.”

“Sounds like you figure on something happening to you,” said Harrison.

“Something may,” Doc told him.

“You usually camp at the spring below town, don’t you?” asked Doc.

Harrison nodded.

“I’ll get off there and walk in the rest of the way,” said Doc. “Thanks for the lift.”

“About that letter …”

“I’ll give it to you in the morning.”

At the spring, Harrison stood for a long time beside the wagon, watching Doc and the horse continue their slow way up the trail to town.

Harrison shook his head. “Queer jasper,” he told himself.

Folks in Sundown didn’t like Doc Falconer … mostly because they didn’t understand or appreciate the dry humor that made the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes.

And that gold mine yarn. To Doc himself it was just another joke, to many of Sundown’s citizens it was actual truth … how Doc would go riding off and be gone for several days, then come back and pay up bills that had been accumulating in the stores for weeks.

Harrison shook his head again. It was no business of his … Doc’s gold mines or Doc’s letters.

Hurriedly he made camp, watering the horses and picketing them out, spending an extra moment with Satan, who whickered and nipped playfully at his shoulder.

“Good horse,” said Harrison and gave him an extra pat, then hurried up the trail to town.

Marshal Albert Haynes was sprawled in a chair behind his desk, picking with a knife at a sliver in his finger.

“Howdy, Johnny,” he said. “Somebody steal some pans?”

“Nope,” said Harrison. “Got a message for you.”

“Shoot,” the marshal invited.

“Some gents stopped me out on the trail with guns. Told me to tell you that if you didn’t turn Jim Westman loose they’d come in and tend to it themselves.”

The marshal bounced up in his chair, stabbed the knife deep into the desk.

“Oh, they did, did they?”

He glared at Harrison. “You go back and tell them hombres to go plumb to hell. I ain’t turning loose no murderer.”

“I’m not telling them a thing,” said Harrison. “They didn’t ask me to. They told me what to tell you and you’ve said no and that’s an end of it.”

Haynes hunched forward. “I ain’t so sure that’s the end of it,” he snarled. “Don’t look good to me, you coming and telling me all this bosh about being held up and told a message for me. Don’t look good …”

“Why, you —!” Even as he spoke, Harrison moved forward, one swift step that brought him towering above the desk. One powerful hand shot out and grabbed the marshal by the shoulder, hauled him to his feet. The other hand, doubled into a sledge hammer fist, moved even as the marshal, face twisted with fear and rage, clawed desperately for gun-butts.

The fist smacked with a hollow sound, a thudding sound that almost echoed in the room. Pain shot through Harrison’s wrist with the force of the blow and he felt Haynes go limp within his grasp. He opened his hand and the man slid down behind the desk and out of sight.

Harrison turned on his heel and walked out onto the street.

Dusk had come and the first lamps of evening were being lit in the business houses that ran along the single street. Two horses stood slack-hipped at the hitching rail in front of the Silver Dollar. Harrison glanced at them as he went past, his eyes barely sliding along them, then stopping in surprise. A sorrel and a blaze-faced bay!

He halted and stared at the horses. Possible, but not likely. Not likely that two other men would ride a sorrel and blaze-faced bay.

He swung around quickly, but the saloon’s porch was empty. From inside came the low buzz of voices and the clink of glasses on the bar.

For a moment, Harrison stood in indecision, then shrugged.

“No business of mine,” he told himself. “I’m getting out before that gang starts hemstitching this town with their forty-fives.”

Rapidly he strode along the sidewalk. The smell of ham and eggs from a restaurant hurried his gait—he recalled the campfire to be built, the supper to be cooked.

There was a light in Doc Falconer’s office over the bank and inside his general store Jake Smith leaned elbows on the counter and talked with a rancher in to buy a month’s supplies. Nice business, Harrison thought. And Ma said it could be gotten cheap. Only I bought a horse instead.

And socked the marshal, said his accusing mind. That’s a hell of a way to start business in a town.

The horses nickered at him companionably as he came up to the wagon.

“Hello, fellers,” he told them. “How’s everything?”

They stamped at him, champing grass.

Only there was something wrong, something that it took a long minute for him to place. Then he knew.

There were only two horses, the team.

Satan was gone!

Heart thumping, he strode toward the place where he’d picketed the black.

Maybe he just pulled the pin and wandered off. Maybe …

But the pin was there, planted solidly in the ground, with the rope trailing from it. He picked up the rope and hauled it in, ran exploring fingers across the free end.

Cut! Slashed with a knife!

Satan had been stolen!

Chapter Two
A Gun Deal from the Bottom

The sorrel and the blaze-faced bay were gone from the hitching rack in front of the Silver Dollar, but there was some excitement going on up the street in front of the Eagle hotel.

For a moment Harrison hesitated, trying to decide whether to go inside the saloon and ask about the men or to hurry up the street in hopes that he might find some trace of them. Ben, the bartender, he remembered, was a surly hombre and probably wouldn’t tell him a thing.

After all, he told himself, standing there in the spatter of light that came from the saloon’s dirty window, he had no evidence the two men had taken Satan; no evidence, even, that the men were the ones who had held him up that afternoon. He had only seen the horses … and other men might ride horses that looked exactly the same.

Slowly, Harrison turned from the saloon, started up the street.

“Johnny!”

He swung around. Ma Elden had stepped out of the crowd in front of the hotel and was waving at him. And suddenly he remembered … remembered a thing that had been shaken from his mind. Carolyn was coming in tonight … coming on the stage.

He turned around, walked slowly back toward the crowd in front of the hotel. Ma hurried out to meet him. She was upset, he saw … upset and a little angry.

“Johnny, I’ve been expecting you. And the stage is late. What do you think has happened?”

“Had some trouble, maybe,” said Harrison. “Broke a wheel or something.”

But even as he said it, he knew the explanation was a weak one. Jack Carter, who drove the stage, prided himself on the time he made. And the road was good.

“I just know …”

“Listen,” snapped Harrison.

From up the street came the faint sound of pounding hoofs and rattling wheels.

“It’s him,” someone shouted. “It’s Carter and the stage!”

Ma beamed happily. “Maybe there ain’t nothing wrong, after all. Maybe it’s just …”

Her words cut off and one hand went to her mouth. The stage had swung around the corner and was coming down the street, not more than a block away, the horses at a dead run, the stage swaying drunkenly, the long reins dragging in the dust, coiling and looping like snakes behind the frightened horses.

A man was slumped across the high dashboard, where he had lodged when he had fallen from the seat. His head rolled limply in the faint lamplight spearing from the stores and his dangling arms swung like pendulums with the swaying of the coach.

Harrison sprang forward with a shout, hand shooting out to grasp the bridle of one of the leaders. The momentum of the animal swung him off his feet and one driving hoof scraped along his leg.

Someone had dived for the lines and gotten them and the horses were slowing to a stop. Harrison flung himself to one side, heard the rumbling wheels rush past him, then was running alongside as the stage came to a halt.

With a leap, he sprang on the front wheel, scrambled to the seat, reached down and lifted the slumped figure that hung against the dashboard. The man was a dead weight in his arms as he pulled him free and the lolling head flopped back to show the grinning teeth of pain, the eyes staring vacantly at death.

Slowly, Harrison laid him back and straightened up. His hand was wet and the sleeve of his shirt was stained with the sticky blood that had glued the dead man’s shirt tight against his back.

Harrison looked down into the white faces that stared up at him.

“It’s Carter,” he told them. “Shot.”

Ma’s scream cut above the murmur of the crowd.

“Where is she? Where’s Carolyn!”

Harrison vaulted from the seat of the stage and pushed toward the open door. A frightened man in a flowered waistcoat cowered against the coach.

Ma yelled at him, hysteria edging her voice. “Where is she? Where’s the girl …”

“They took her,” the man yelled back. “They must have. They …”

“Don’t you know?” screamed Ma.

Hatless Joe loomed up beside Ma’s squat, angry figure.

“Now, you calm down,” he said, “and let the gent get a word in edgewise.”

He said to the man: “Take your time and get your wits together and tell us all about it.”

The man put up a trembling hand and pulled at his wilted collar.

“They held us up just this side of the river, where the road begins to climb the rise.”

“They?” screamed Ma. “Who was it?”

“He don’t know,” said Hatless. “He’s a stranger in these parts.”

“They held us up,” the man went on, “and they told us to get out. There was just me and the girl riding back here and the driver up front. They let the driver stay up on the seat but they made me and the girl get out. It was just getting dusk and I couldn’t see them good, but there were several of them, four or five, I’d say, and they wore masks and carried guns.

“One of them started toward the girl and made a move as if he was going to put his arm around her and she hauled off and slapped him. Hit him in the face and he cussed. The driver got up from the seat and started to jump down. Like he was going to come down and tangle with the fellow that the girl had hit. But he hadn’t no more than got to his feet than somebody shot him. One of the fellows still sitting on his horse was the one that done it.”

Ma yelled at him. “And you stood by …”

Hatless yelled at her. “You shut up and let this gent go on with his story.”

The man pulled at his collar with trembling fingers. “When the driver was shot, the horses bolted. Guess they started the minute they felt the lines go slack. I turned around and jumped for the open door of the stage and made it.…”

He lifted his hands and let them drop. “I guess that’s all,” he said. “That’s everything that happened.”

Ma moved toward him threateningly. “I’d ought to skin you alive,” she shouted at him. “A great big hulk of a man and you ran …”

Hatless put out a hand and jerked her back. “You leave him alone,” he told her. “He was scared and he didn’t think.”

“I guess I didn’t,” said the man.

“Kidnaped,” yelled Ma. “That’s what it is. My little daughter kidnaped.”

A heavy shouldered man pushed through the gaping crowd. “Maybe it isn’t that at all, Mrs. Elden,” he said. “Maybe they didn’t take her. She may be out there along the trail.”

Harrison saw that the heavy shouldered man was Dunham, of the Bar X spread.

“Well, then, why don’t you get out there and see,” yelled Ma. “What are you standing around for?”

Dunham stiffened. “We will, Ma’am, just as soon as I can get the boys together.”

“Standing around!” shrieked Ma. “Standing around! That’s all you’re doing, every one of you … just standing around!”

The crowd shrank back before her belligerency, started to scatter.

For the first time Ma saw Harrison in the crowd. She moved toward him, put out a hand and grasped him by the arm.

“You’re going to do something, ain’t you, Johnny? You’re going to do something to get her back.…”

Harrison saw the faint gleam of tears in the flint-hard eyes. Cold inside, he nodded. “Sure thing, Ma. Sure thing.”

Ma yelled at him. “Well, get going, then. Never saw anything like a man. Standing around, standing around …”

Harrison shook his head. “Look, Ma, I just thought of something. I’m not jumping a horse and riding out there on a wild goose chase. The others can do that as well as I can. And it wouldn’t do any good. They got all creation to hunt in and not an idea where to look.”

“Unless she’s just out there, sitting along the road, waiting for someone to come along,” said Hatless, hopefully.

“Not much chance of that,” Harrison declared. “Ma’s probably right when she figured it was a kidnaping. And I got a plan.”

“I hope it works,” Ma said, acidly, her very tone implying that some other plans of Harrison’s hadn’t worked at all.

“It’s got to work,” Harrison said grimly. “If it don’t, I’m buzzard meat.”

He stepped forward and grasped her shoulders, pulled her close and kissed her on the cheek.

“Well, I never …” gasped Ma Elden. She put up a gnarled, weathered hand, rubbed at her leathery cheek.

Harrison swung around and strode away, heading around the stage, back toward the street.

Rounding the stage, he came face to face with Marshal Haynes. The two men stopped dead in their tracks, not more than six feet apart, staring at one another.

The marshal’s hands moved swiftly, driving for his gun-butts. Harrison knew his own hands were moving, streaking for his belt, but it was almost as if his hands were those of another person, acting independently, almost as if by instinct.

Steel rasped against leather and his hands were snapping the two guns into position.

Guns halfway out, Haynes froze, staring at the muzzles that were tilted at him.

“I wouldn’t do it, Marshal,” Harrison said, softly. “I would just put them back.”

Haynes gulped, Adam’s apple bobbing in his bull throat. His hands loosened and the guns slid back.

“Slow,” said Harrison, and smugness crept into his voice even when he tried to keep it out. “Too slow to be a lawman.”

For a long minute the two men stood facing one another.

“Someday,” said Haynes. “Someday.…”

His tongue came out and licked dry lips.

Harrison nodded carelessly. “Yes, Haynes, someday, maybe. But not now. I got work to do. Get out of my way.”

He motioned with the right gun-hand and the marshal moved, stepping swiftly to one side.

Harrison strode across the street, leaped to the board sidewalk. By the time he reached the Silver Dollar he was running. Behind him he heard the shouts of men forming the posse, heard the shrill voice of Ma Elden rising above the shouts and the pounding of hoofs.

By the time he had hitched up his team and driven the wagon onto the prairie stretching back of the town, Sundown was quiet. Sitting in the wagon-seat and listening, he could hear no sound. The posse apparently had ridden off. The buildings squatted, stolid, square match boxes dumped along the street.

Unhitching the team, he tied them to a wagon wheel, found a hammer in the wagon and headed for the row of dark, quiet buildings.

Back of the frame structure that served as the jail and marshal’s office, he crouched in the darkness, ears strained for the sounds that did not come. The town was deathly quiet. Every man who was able to ride, he knew, was pounding out along the trail that the stage had taken, hunting for Carolyn.

He crept along the building, came to a halt beneath the window barred by heavy planking.

“Westman!” he whispered, softly.

The silence held.

Crouching against the building, Harrison felt the first chill of apprehension and doubt steal across his mind. Maybe he was wrong … maybe.

But somehow it all linked up. The men who had stopped him on the trail, the holdup of the stage, Dunham leading the posse, Carolyn’s disappearance, Westman here in jail when he should be in the jail at Rattlesnake.

“Westman!” he called again.

Faint sounds of stirring came from inside and he heard the soft thud of feet crossing the floor toward the window.

A cautious voice came out of the darkness.

“That you, Spike?”

“Not Spike,” said Harrison. “It’s Johnny Harrison.”

He saw the man’s face faintly, a white smudge in the darkness behind the planking.

“Harrison!” The man’s voice hissed through the night. “Say, you’re the hombre …”

“Yes, I’m the one,” said Harrison.

“You better keep out of that lawdog’s way,” warned Westman. “He’s ripe to claw your guts out.”

“He had a chance to just a while ago,” said Harrison, “and he didn’t do it.”

“What you want?” asked Westman.

“Not a thing,” said Harrison. “Figured maybe you’d like to get out of here.”

Westman laughed softly, but he didn’t answer.

“Got a hammer with me,” Harrison told him. “Think I can get these planks off.”

“What’s the deal? Spike send you?”

“No one sent me,” Harrison told him. “It’s all my own idea. Need a place to do some hiding. Thought you could lead me to it.”

“So that’s it,” Westman said.

Harrison waited, ears strained for any sound along the street. None came.

“All right,” Westman said, finally. “Start ripping off them boards.”

Harrison reached up with the hammer, worked the claws under the edge of the lower plank and pried. The spikes squealed faintly, protesting. Harrison tugged savagely, bearing down upon the hammer handle. The plank came free and hands from the inside reached out and pushed it away to clear the window.

“Just a minute,” said Harrison. “I’ll have another one.”

“Don’t bother,” panted Westman. “This is big enough.”

His hands gripped the window ledge and his head and shoulders came through, thrusting, struggling. Harrison dropped the hammer and reached out to help.

On the ground, Westman ran exploring hands over his body. “Skinned up some,” he said, “but nothing serious. You got horses?”

“Team and wagon. You’ll have to ride in that.”

Westman made a motion of disgust. “We could pick up a couple.”

Harrison shook his head. “Can’t take the chance. You’ll be safer in the wagon than in a saddle. No one would think of looking for you there.”

Back at the wagon, Westman helped hitch up the team and climbed up on the seat. Harrison picked up the reins. “Which way?” he asked.

“Head for Rattlesnake,” Westman told him and there was an ugliness in his voice that had not been there before.

Harrison clucked and the team started. The dry wheel squeaked.

Westman swore. “Can’t you do something about that wheel?”

“Probably could,” Harrison admitted, “but I never did get around to it. Just sit back and take it easy. Nothing’s going to happen.”

He headed north, striking across the prairie toward the trail that ran to Rattlesnake. A pale moon came up, a sickle in the sky playing hide and seek with clouds. The wind rustled the tall, dry grass and from some wooded ravine an owl complained. Half an hour later they struck the trail.

Westman stirred restlessly, eyes keeping watch on the faint, night horizon.

“Better split your guns with me,” he suggested.

“The guns stay with me,” Harrison told him, crisply.

Westman flared. “What the hell! I …”

“Just playing it close to my belt,” said Harrison calmly. “You and I made a deal and I aim to see that you carry out your end of it.”

The trail wound into broken ground, the level road giving way to steep pitches and sharp turns. Hills studded with scrub pine made a jigsaw skyline.

Westman fidgeted. “I heard something.”

“Imagination,” snapped Harrison.

“Like a horse.”

Somewhere in the darkness a shod hoof struck a stone with ringing noise. Westman wheeled swiftly in the seat, hand clawing for Harrison’s right hand gun.

“Hey!” yelled Harrison, but the man already was rising to his feet, gun gripped in his hand. With one, swift motion he was gone, leaping out and away from the wagon. A thud came out of the darkness and then the rustle of bushes.

A voice bellowed: “Stick ’em up!” Harrison pulled the team to a stop, slowly raised his hands, trying to make out the shadowy figure of the man and horse beside the trail.

Marshal Haynes sat the horse, a stolid, square-shouldered figure, teeth gleaming in his beard, moonlight shining on the gun he held.

“Lucky thing that I had to come back,” he said. “Lucky thing no one thought to take along a lantern.”

Another horse moved in the darkness, came alongside the marshal’s.

The voice of Ben, the bartender, spoke: “Both of them here, marshal?”

The marshal roared at Harrison. “What did you do with Westman?”

Harrison pretended surprise. “Westman? You must be loco, marshal. I don’t know any Westman.”

“You helped him break out of jail,” the marshal grated. “When I wouldn’t let him out when you threatened me, you came back and let him out. Ben, here, heard that squeaky wheel of yours when you and Westman drove off.”

“Didn’t think nothing about it, at the time,” said Ben. “But when Al here came steaming into the place yelling that Westman was gone, I remembered it.”

“What did you do with him?” the marshal roared. “Where you got him hid?”

His gun arm leveled suddenly and the gun belched searing fire. The canvas cover of the wagon jerked and a pan clanged with the impact of the bullet. The gun bellowed again and yet again.

The marshal yelled. “You, Westman, come out of there. Ain’t no use in hiding. If you don’t …”

“Ah, hell,” said Ben. “He ain’t there. Let’s just take Johnny back and hang him instead.”

“You sure have run yourself up an awful bill with all that promiscuous shooting,” Harrison told Haynes. “I’ll tell you what it is soon as I figure up the damage.”

The marshal’s voice was icy with rage. “Smart-aleck, eh? I’ll fix it so there won’t be no bill.”

Jangling bells of alarm rang in Harrison’s brain … bells set off by the murderous intent that ran through the marshal’s voice. He surged up out of the seat, hand going back to the left gun-butt. But he knew he’d never make it. Back in Sundown the marshal had had a head start and he’d beat him to the draw, but you can’t beat a man who already has his fist wrapped around a gun.

A six-gun roared, stabbing with an orange finger through the dark and the marshal screamed in pain and rage as the gun flew from his hand.

Out of the darkness Westman’s voice said: “Next time it’ll be in the head instead of in the arm.”

Harrison, his own gun out, swung it toward the bartender, who froze in the saddle and slowly raised his arms.

“You gents,” commanded Harrison, “get down off them broncs. We’re trading the team and wagon for them.”

“And toss the gun away,” Harrison told Ben. “Just reach down easy and let it drop. If you make a sudden move, I’ll plug you.”

Carefully the two got down off the horses, climbed into the wagon seat under the threat of Westman’s gun. Harrison seized the bartender’s horse, vaulted into the saddle.

The marshal’s teeth were chattering with fear and rage. “I’ll get you for this,” he growled. “I’ll get the both of you.”

“You get that team turned around,” snapped Westman, “and get started out of here.”

Awkwardly, the marshal turned the team around, yelling at the horses. The wagon clattered at a fast clip back toward Sundown.

For a long moment Harrison sat his saddle, staring in the direction the wagon had taken. Harrison stiffened. Westman’s gun was out, resting across the saddle, trained straight at his middle. And in the pale moonlight the man’s face was twisted into something that might have been a grin, but probably wasn’t.

“This,” said Westman easily, “is as far as we go together.”

For a second Harrison sat speechless, staring at the shining muzzle of the gun. Then he lifted his head, stirred slightly in the saddle.

“So you’re backing out,” he snapped. “You get me in a jam and you’re backing out.”

“And you played me for a sucker,” snarled Westman. “You wanted to have me lead you someplace and you thought that I would do it if you got me out of jail.”

He spat viciously. “Hell, I didn’t need your help to get out of there. If you hadn’t come along the boys would have been in in a day or two and yanked the place up by the roots to turn me loose plenty pronto!”

He motioned abruptly with the gun barrel. “Hit the dirt, tin horn. And don’t try to follow me.”

Harrison slowly swung his horse around. There was, he knew, no use of trying to argue. No use of doing anything. He’d gambled and he’d lost.

“I’ll be watching,” warned Westman, “and if you try to trail me, I’ll waste a bullet on you … right between the eyes.”

The horse paced slowly down the road … back toward Sundown.

But he couldn’t go there, Harrison knew. He couldn’t go anywhere.

“Damn fool,” he told himself.

He switched around in the saddle and Westman still sat his horse in the middle of the road, a vague blot in the feeble moonlight.

I could pull my gun and shoot it out, Harrison told himself. I could …

But he’d gain nothing in a shoot-out with Westman, he realized. That wasn’t the way to go about getting out of the jam … and what a jam, he thought. Assisting an accused murderer in escape, resisting a marshal, stealing a horse.…

“They’ll hang me, sure,” he said.

He shrugged and faced forward in the saddle, rocking with the slow plodding of the horse, head bent forward, thinking. There had to be a way to carry out the thing he had started to do. There had to be a way to find out where Carolyn had been taken, to find out why she had been taken. And Satan? There was Satan, too. Best horse he ever had.

Then, suddenly, he had it. Doc might help him. Doc would understand. Doc, with his legendary gold mine, with his riding off and coming back with money, Doc with his cold wry humor and the crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes, might be the friend he needed. Hours of darkness still remained. Time to go and see.

Doc might know something.… Doc might help him out.

CHAPTER THREE
Trapper Bill Disappears

Squeezed tightly against the wall of the bank, Harrison stood motionless in the narrow alleyway between the bank and Smith’s general store, listening for any sign of life out on the street. Back of the bank the horse he had taken from the bartender whickered softly and pawed at the ground.

“Damn the horse,” thought Harrison. “He’ll wake somebody up.”

But the street apparently was clear. Over it and up and down its length hung the unnatural, breathless silence that comes in the dark hours just before dawn.

Satisfied, Harrison slipped out of the alleyway, ducked into the doorway that led upstairs over the bank to Doc Falconer’s office and living quarters.

Light seeped from beneath the door of Doc’s waiting room and Harrison hesitated, sudden fear gripping at his throat.

“Of course, he might have a light,” he told himself. “He might leave one burning so if someone needed him.…”

Carefully he approached the waiting room door, reached out and turned the knob.

Doc was slumped forward on top of the desk on which the lamp was burning, slumped not as a man would slump in sleep, but with his body twisted.

“Doc!” Harrison whispered hoarsely.

A knife hilt stuck out of Doc’s back, just between the shoulder blades, a little low and to the left. The cheap rag rug was scuffed beneath his feet as if he’d tried to rise and then had fallen back.

Harrison moved across the room, stood beside the desk, hands hanging at his side. Doc was dead. There could be no doubt of that. The one man who might have been able to tell him some facts that he needed to know, must know.

Killed with a knife blow in the back as he sat writing at the desk. Harrison’s eyes took in the pencil and the scattered sheets. Harrison stiffened, remembering back to the afternoon. Doc’s words came back to him:

Wonder if you’d keep a letter for me and forget you ever saw it.

A letter that he said he might come back and get but if he didn’t Harrison was to mail. Perhaps … perhaps this very letter.

Harrison stooped quickly to examine the desk, reaching out to shuffle the paper. But there was no letter. The sheets were blank and clean … no pencil strokes upon them.

Harrison’s breath caught in his throat. Here was the letter … or at least a duplicate of the letter Doc had been writing. The pencil had been hard and the paper thin and the lines were lettered here, once the light caught the paper right, as legibly as they had been upon the sheet on which they had been written.

He bent closer to the sheet, adjusting it so that the light brought out the lines, and read:

U.S. Marshal,
Omaha
My dear sir:

You no doubt have received complaints of the horse thievery going on in this territory. Through diligent observance, not without danger to my person, I have ascertained that the gang is using Grizzly Valley as it headquarters. Few persons know the exact location of this valley and while I hope to be here to lead you and your party to it when you arrive, if such should not be the case, I would advise that you contact Trapper Bill, who has a cabin.…

A creaking board brought Harrison spinning around, right hand darting for his gun.

In the doorway stood the man with the flowered waistcoat who had come in with the stage. His lips were drawn back in a vicious snarl and one gold tooth gleamed dully in the lamplight. His hand, coming away from the inside pocket of his coat, held a snub-nosed gun.

The gun snicked viciously, like a tiny, yapping dog. The bullet slammed past his head and smashed into the window.

Harrison tilted up the muzzle of his own gun, hauled the trigger back savagely, too hurried for smooth shooting.

The little gun in the gold-toothed man’s hand snarled again, but its tiny noise was drowned out by the bellow of the .45 in Harrison’s fist. Something twitched at Harrison’s left shoulder, a stinging blow that rocked him on his heels as he watched the man in front of him sag back against the door.

The man hit the door jamb and bounced forward, wilting as he bounced. The gun leaped from his fingers, skittered and slid, a spinning wheel of blue across the lamplit floor. The man slumped to his knees, hung for an instant, then pitched forward, fell on one elbow and rolled over, face up, limp jaw hanging open, eyes rolled back.

Slowly, cat-footed, Harrison moved back toward the window. His eyes switched from the dead man in the doorway to the dead man at the desk and for the first time he saw the soft gleam of the chain that hung from Doc’s fingers. Stooping swiftly, he examined it … a gold watch chain, its fragile links snapped at both ends.

And as he looked at it, he knew why the man in the doorway had come back … knew whose hand had wielded the knife still sticking in Doc’s back.

Swiftly, he went across the room, stooped over the dead man, saw the two ends of broken chain that hung from the pockets of the flowered waistcoat. A chain that Doc, rising in the moment before death had struck him down, had seized and broken as the knife-man backed away from his victim.

On the street below a door slammed open with a bang. Boots hit the steps. Harrison spun around, raced for the window shattered by the gold-toothed man’s bullet, dived through it, crossed arms shielding his face. He landed on the lean-to roof and rolled. Sprawling on the ground, he scrambled to his feet. In front of him the tied horse snorted and reared. With one swift jerk, Harrison tore loose the reins from the post, leaped for the saddle.

From the window he’d just quitted a gun blasted in the night. The horse was spinning on dancing hind feet, forelegs reaching out. Harrison yelled and the animal came down with a jolt and ran. The gun spoke again and Harrison heard the whine of the bullet passing overhead.

Faint shouts came from the street. Harrison bent low on the horse’s neck, the drum of hoofs beating in his head. The cool wind smelled of grass that had been drying in the sun. The sickle moon hung low above the western horizon.

For the first time, Harrison became aware of the stiffness in his left shoulder and when he put up a hand, he found that the shirt was soaked. Moving his arm, he knew no bones were broken. The stranger’s bullet had no more than creased him, tearing through muscles.

Something rustled in his shirt pocket as he moved his arm. Taking it out, he saw that it was a wad of crumpled paper. The duplicate of the letter that Doc had started, the letter to the marshal back at Omaha.

Wonder if you’d keep a letter for me.…

Harrison crinkled his brow, thinking. There could be no doubt that this was the letter Doc had meant for him to keep. But why keep? If Doc had wanted to tip off the marshal, he could have mailed the letter himself. It was as simple as that. But he’d said that maybe he’d be back to pick it up. Did that mean that under certain circumstances he would not have mailed the letter?

Harrison shook his head. Carefully he smoothed the sheet of paper out and folded it, put it back into his pocket.

The man with the flowered waistcoat and the shiny gold tooth had killed Doc to get that letter. Had gotten it, in fact, and then came back to get the broken watch chain, knowing that it would be evidence that might convict him. Too rattled to take it the first time and coming back to get it. Or maybe not realizing that it had been broken until he’d left the place.

The man had come in on the stage and within the next few hours had plunged his knife into Doc’s back and stolen the letter. That must mean the man had come to Sundown to do that very thing … and if such had been the case, he must have known that Doc intended to write the letter. Harrison frowned. But that was impossible, he told himself. Doc wasn’t one to talk. He told no one his business and maybe that was part of the reason that nobody really liked him.

The gold-toothed man had come on the stagecoach to kill Doc and while he’d been on the stage someone had kidnaped Carolyn Elden. Maybe fancy waistcoat had had something to do with the kidnaping, too. Maybe things hadn’t happened just the way he told them. He could have told any story that he wanted to, for there was no one to contradict him. Carolyn had been kidnaped and the driver of the stage was dead.

It linked somehow … what had happened to Carolyn and Doc, Doc’s letter, Westman in jail, even Dunham riding with the posse. For Sundown wasn’t Dunham’s town. Rattlesnake was more to Dunhams’s liking and Sundown seldom saw any of the Bar X men. Funny that Dunham should have been Johnny-at-the-rat-hole when the stage came in.

Harrison put his hand up to the shirt pocket and the letter crinkled under his touch. Grizzly Valley, the letter had said, and added that few folks knew its exact location. Harrison touched the letter again. Grizzly valley, one of those places you hear about once in a while, but where no one’s ever been. But Trapper Bill would know, Trapper Bill, at his cabin out on the south edge of the badlands.

The horse had slowed to an easy lope and Harrison urged it to greater speed.

“Hoss,” he said, “we’re dropping in on Trapper Bill.”

The sun was three hours up the sky when the horse and rider wound cautiously down the tortuous trail that led to the coulee where Trapper Bill’s cabin huddled under the looming cliff of vari-colored clay.

Smoke rose lazily from the chimney of the shack and Trapper Bill lounged against the door, watching Harrison ride up. Two decrepit hounds came bellowing and escorted the rider in.

Trapper Bill took the pipe out of his whiskers, spat across the chopping block.

“Howdy, young feller,” he said. “Where did you leave your wagon?”

“Back in town,” Harrison told him, shortly.

Trapper Bill eyed him speculatively. “Been in a ruckus?”

“Little argument,” Harrison explained. “Hombre shot me up a bit.”

“You shot back, I reckon.”

Harrison got down out of the saddle, stiffly. The horse stood with bowed head, sides heaving.

“Riding kind of hard,” said Trapper.

Harrison nodded. “The marshal took a dislike to me.”

Trapper snorted. “That there marshal don’t have right good sense. Probably the feller needed a little shooting to make a Christian of him.”

Harrison leaned against the other side of the doorway, took out papers and tobacco sack, began a cigarette.

“Tell me, Trapper. You know how to get to Grizzly valley?”

Trapper pulled the pipe out of his whiskers.

“Figuring on going there?”

Harrison nodded. “Ain’t in your right mind,” Trapper told him. “Ain’t been there myself for ten years or more. Nothing to go for.”

“Have to meet a fellow there,” Harrison explained.

Trapper wagged his head. “Funny spot you pick for a meeting place. But if you’re bound set on getting there.…”

He squatted on the ground, traced with his finger in the dust.

“You go straight north until you hit Cow Canyon.…”

His voice mumbled on, his finger tracing the map.

“Figure you got it fixed square in your mind?” he asked.

Harrison nodded. Trapper smoothed the dirt with his palm, arose.

“You look all beat out,” he said.

“No sleep since yesterday morning,” Harrison told him.

“Better come in and take a nap while I cook you up some coffee.”

Harrison shook his head. “Got to be pushing on.”

“Hell,” said Trapper, “that marshal won’t nohow find you here. He’ll hit plumb for Rattlesnake. Figure that you streaked for there.”

“Not this marshal, he won’t,” said Harrison. “You wouldn’t catch this marshal dead ten miles in any direction from Rattlesnake.”

Trapper puffed at his pipe. “Did hear the Rattlesnake and Sundown folks were plumb bitter about some little matter.”

“Splitting a county,” said Harrison.

“Wouldn’t know,” said Trapper. “Don’t get around, myself. Just over to the Elden spread, once in a while. Sing Lee keeps me fixed up with panther juice. Making his own now. Got a still rigged up out of an old wash boiler. Figured maybe the stuff would poison me, but it ain’t hurt me yet.”

“Hatless Joe was telling me about it,” said Harrison. “Claims it’s got forty rod beat all hollow.”

“Damn smart Chinaman,” Trapper said. “Taking up reading now. Tried to talk me into it, too, but I ain’t got the patience for it. Foolish way to spend a feller’s time.”

“Comes in handy, sometimes, though.”

“Maybe it does,” Trapper agreed, “but I got along without books and stuff for sixty years and I figure I can go another twenty.”

He squinted at Harrison. “You look plumb tuckered out. You’ll never make Grizzly in the shape you’re in. Better come in and have a little nap. I’ll wake you up in an hour or so.”

Harrison weakened. Not until now had he realized how tired he was, tired and muscle-sore. And the shoulder where the bullet had flicked him was a dull, red hurt.

“Just an hour or so,” he finally said. “You’ll promise to wake me, then. Can’t waste much time.”

“Cross my heart,” pledged Trapper, “and hope to stumble. Some sleep and bear meat under your belt and you’re good for another day. I’ll take care of your animal.”

Harrison entered the door, made his way around the rickety table, sat down on the bunk. The place was filthy, filled with the odor of ill-cooked food, of sweaty, greasy clothing. But he scarcely noticed it.

His eyes closed as soon as his head hit the burlap pillow. In just a little while, said a hazy thought, I’ll be on the way again. Grizzly valley. Carolyn. Maybe Satan, too.

He woke with a sudden start, sitting bolt upright, filled with the feeling that something had gone wrong.

For a moment he fought to recollect where he was and then it came with a sudden rush.

“Trapper!” he yelled, surging to his feet.

There was no answer. Sultry, summer silence hung upon the cabin. Somewhere a fly was buzzing, but there was no other sound.

Outside in the glaring sunlight the silence held. The sun was high … and that, he suddenly knew, was what was wrong. The sun had been a morning sun when he had gone to sleep and now it was after noon. Standing, spread-legged, staring at the sun, his hand went to his shirt pocket, tapping for the paper that should have been there. But there was no rustle, nothing there at all.

He stood for a moment, stupefied.

Trapper Bill had run out on him, had stolen the paper in his pocket and run out on him. But run to where? A horse nickered and Harrison wheeled around, hand driving for his gun.

Then he relaxed. For the horse was riderless and trotting toward him and he recognized it as the one he’d taken from the bartender and ridden to this place.

“Good hoss,” he said. “Good hoss.”

He moved swiftly forward. He was getting out, he told himself, as fast as the horse could travel.

CHAPTER FOUR
Johnny Holds Up the Boss

The man in the gray slouch hat stepped from behind a boulder and thrust forth the rifle.

“Where the hell do you think you’re going?” he demanded.

Harrison reined up, sat limply in the saddle.

“I could have shot you,” said the man, “when you was coming up the trail and I damn near done it. Just natural kindness that kept me from it.”

“I came to see the boss,” said Harrison.

“He ain’t seeing no one,” said the man. “Fact, he’d be sorer than hell if he knowed I didn’t shoot you. Told me to. ‘Plug anybody comes up the trail,’ he said.”

“I got a message from Doc Falconer,” said Harrison.

The man’s jaw dropped. “But, Doc …”

Then his mouth snapped shut and he jerked the rifle up.

Hoofs clattered from the opposite slope and the man, gun almost to his shoulder, hesitated.

The horseman rounded a bend below the pile of boulders, reined in his horse.

“Hello, Westman,” said Harrison.

Westman sat his horse, staring at Harrison, then he spoke to Spike.

“Put down that gun,” he said. “You might have killed the man.”

Spike muttered feebly. “But the boss said to shoot anyone that came.…”

“Yes, sure, he said that. But he didn’t know that Harrison was coming.”

“You know this jasper?” asked Spike, in amazement.

“Know him! He’s the man that broke me out of jail!”

Spike’s face split into a grin. “Well, in that case, maybe it’s different. Says he’s bringing word from Doc. But I thought that Doc …”

Westman yelled at him savagely: “Shut up!”

“If you mean you thought that Doc was dead,” Harrison told Spike, “you’re right. I got there right after he was killed and I got the letter he was writing.”

“But that man the boss.…”

“If the man was the gent with the daisies on his vest, I killed him.”

He laughed at the two of them, Spike with the rifle dangling in his hand, Westman stiff and straight upon the horse.

“So, if you’re figuring on fixing it so that something happens to me,” said Harrison, “you better give it up. You can’t afford to kill me.”

Westman wheeled his horse, said brusquely: “Come on. You better see the boss.”

“That,” declared Harrison, “is what I come for.”

They rode carefully down the rocky trail and ahead of them Harrison saw the spreading green of a hidden valley.

“The boss ain’t going to be pleased about this,” said Westman. “He’s plenty sore to start with. Sore at me for getting out of jail. Figured on using me for bait, I guess. Wanted me to stay there so he could have an excuse to shoot hell out of the town.”

“How do you feel about it?” asked Harrison.

Westman hesitated, as if debating his answer. “To tell you the truth, Harrison, I don’t really know. My wife, Marie, she’s all for you. Says the boss don’t care what happens to me. She figures maybe that if I had got killed in the jail break the boss was stewing up it would of pleased him fine.”

“Sounds like you and the boss don’t get along.”

“We’ve had our arguments,” Westman said tersely.

The trail reached the valley and slanted across its greenness, heading for the group of buildings huddled under the western wall of a towering escarpment. They splashed through a ford in the river.

In front of one of the larger residences Westman swung in to the hitching rack. Two men sitting on the front steps got up and lounged against the porch railing, watching Westman and Harrison dismount.

“The boss in?” asked Westman.

One of the men jerked his thumb toward the door, said nothing. The other gave his attention to rolling a quirly. Harrison glanced quickly, closely at the man who had jerked his thumb. There was something hauntingly familiar about the man, about his bearing rather than his face.

“Come on,” said Westman.

Harrison followed him into the house. At the door of a small room furnished as an office he stopped stock still, staring at the man with his feet cocked up on the desk.

Dunham! Dunham, of Bar X!

The big rancher took a cigar out of his mouth, spat at a cuspidor and missed.

“Don’t look so damned astonished, Johnny,” he said. “Who did you expect to find?”

Harrison paced forward a step. He understood now. “So this is why you don’t want the county split.”

Dunham waved his cigar, airily. “Let me tell you something, Johnny. She ain’t going to be split, either. Me, I get along swell the way it is. The boys at Rattlesnake understand the situation, but that damn Sundown gang would be riding my tail all the time … all the time.”

“Nothing strange about the Rattlesnake gang understanding you,” Harrison said, blithely. “You practically hand pick them.”

Dunham chuckled good naturedly.

“Ain’t none of them damn Sundowners suspected me, not out loud, at least. Except maybe Ma Elden and she didn’t peep about it. Figured, I guess, she wasn’t sure enough. And now I got her where I want her. I got it fixed so she’ll never crack a whisper.”

“Carolyn,” said Harrison, quietly.

Dunham put the cigar back in his mouth, leered around it. “You figure things out fast,” he said. “When Ma gets the note the gal’s going to send her, she’ll get out and work against the county splitting. She’ll do an about-face so fast it’ll make her dizzy.” He chuckled at the thought. “Imagine Ma Elden lining up with Rattlesnake!”

“Smart,” said Harrison. “Smart operator, Dunham. You even were on hand to join the posse that went out hunting Carolyn.”

“Sure,” Dunham told him. “I think of everything.”

“And rigged one of your buzzards all up in city togs to do a killing job on Doc. Or was it somebody you hired to come in and do the trick?”

“Someone I hired,” said Dunham, easily, “but I played it safe. He doesn’t even know who hired him.”

“I hope you haven’t paid him yet,” said Harrison, “because he sure botched up the works.”

Dunham’s mouth flopped open and the cigar tumbled to the desk. His feet came down off the desk with a heavy thump.

“What’s that!” he roared.

“The gent with the daisies killed Doc all right enough,” said Harrison, “but I sort of interfered. I pegged your killing hombre with a hunk of lead and got the letter Doc was writing.”

With an angry gesture, Dunham swept the burning cigar off the desk. His face was red and flushed.

“What letter?” he shouted.

Harrison laughed quietly. “Why, I thought you knew,” he said. “The one to Omaha. To the marshal there. Doc must sort of hinted to you that he was going to write it.”

Dunham’s hand moved swiftly beneath the desk, came up with a heavy six-gun that leveled on Harrison’s stomach.

“Pull that trigger,” said Harrison, “and there’s a noose around your neck. Doc had got quite a ways along in that letter. He had put in some names.”

“Where is it?” Dunham asked, icily. “Hand it over to me.”

“I left it with a friend of mine,” Harrison told him, “and asked him to mail it if I didn’t come and get it. Told him if I wasn’t back by tomorrow morning to send it on to Omaha.”

Dunham snarled. “I could get it out of you, you lousy wagon tramp. I could …”

“You can’t do a thing,” said Harrison, softly. “I’ve got you across a barrel and you know I have. Kill me and the letter goes to Omaha. Wait too long to make up your mind and it goes to Omaha. So you better put away the gun and let us talk some business.”

The six-gun in Dunham’s fist sagged.

“What do you want, Harrison?”

“How much did Doc hold you up for?”

Dunham hesitated. “Ten thousand,” he said, finally, “and it was too damn much. If he’d asked four or five …”

“It’s going to cost you more than that,” Harrison told him, flatly.

Dunham smashed his fist against the desk. “I won’t pay it,” he shouted. “I’ll …”

“It will cost you a woman and a horse,” said Harrison.

“A woman and a …”

“Carolyn Elden and the black horse that one of your men stole from me.”

Dunham looked relieved. A grin crept across his face.

“Now, Johnny, that’s fine. You get me the letter and then you and the gal ride out on the horse and don’t tell no one where you been.”

He licked his lips, like a cat that had just lapped up a plate of cream. “No trouble at all, you see. We make the deal and everything’s all right.”

Harrison shook his head. “And you’d have men along the trail to bushwhack us before we’d gone a mile.”

Dunham raised his hands in horror. “Never! I stick to my word. I’ll shoot square …”

Boots pounded on the porch outside and the door squeaked open. Harrison spun on his heel, backed against the wall. The boots tramped across the outer room and the man came in the door.

At the sight of him, Harrison’s hand slipped swiftly for his gun.

“Hello, marshal,” said Dunham smoothly. “Don’t mind Johnny over there. He’s just sort of nervous.”

Marshal Albert Haynes stood rigid, staring at the gun in Harrison’s hand.

“Get them up,” snapped Harrison. “All of you. You, too, Westman!”

He switched a quick glance at Dunham, still seated in the chair, but with his elbows on the desk and his hands lifted stiffly in the air.

“So you hired him, too,” said Harrison.

Dunham grunted. “Bought him. Sundown don’t pay its marshal much.”

Still watching Harrison, Haynes spoke out of the corner of his mouth. “Got a letter for you, Dunham. Took it out of the pocket of the hombre you sent to kill Falconer.”

Dunham chuckled heavily. “You made a good bluff, Johnny,” he said, “but I guess it’s run out now.”

CHAPTER FIVE
Bare Fists vs. Three Guns

Harrison’s brain spun, but his gun hand held steady and his face was grim. Dunham was right. His bluff had run out to nothing and he was on his own. A moment before Dunham would not have dared to lift a gun against him, but now he was fair game for any bullet that should come his way.

“Hold still,” he told them. “Anyone that moves will get it in the guts.”

Dunham laughed at him. “Better think fast, Johnny. You can’t stand there all day. The next move is up to you.”

And that, Harrison knew, was the bitter truth. Slowly, cautiously, he catfooted toward the door, slid into the doorway. His hand reached out and grasped the knob.

“Good luck, Johnny,” said Dunham, and the man was laughing at him … laughing because he knew that Johnny couldn’t make it, knew that he would die as soon as he reached the street.

“I’ll shove that laugh right down your throat,” said Harrison. “With bullets!”

He stepped back and slammed the door behind him, ran across the room, heading for the stairs that ran to the upper floor. Half way up them, he swung around to cover his back trail, but there was no one there. The door into the office still was closed, but someone was shouting out a window to someone in the street.

“Don’t let him get out! Watch all the doors and windows!”

Trapped, Harrison told himself. Trapped here in this house, without a chance to win.

A soft voice came to him from above.

“Johnny! Johnny Harrison!”

He swung around, a cry surging in this throat.

“Carolyn!”

She stood there, at the top of the stairs, more beautiful than he had remembered her. She wore a dress that matched her eyes and her hair was done up in a way he’d never seen … piled on top of her head instead of being braided into pigtails. Half school girl of the east … half Ma Elden’s daughter as he remembered her.

“I knew you’d find me, Johnny,” she said, and her voice was soft. “I knew that you would come.”

“Get back!” warned Harrison. “Get back out of sight!”

He sprang up the stairs toward her, dragged her back out of line of the room below.

“Trouble, Johnny?”

Harrison half groaned. “Up to my eyes,” he said. “I thought I had them bluffed, but it didn’t work.”

There were shouts outside the house, the sound of running feet, men calling to one another, the rushing pound of hoofs.

“You here all alone?”

He nodded glumly, then asked: “How about you?”

“Marie was with me, but she went out and left me for a minute.”

“Marie?”

“Jim Westman’s wife. She’s been with me all the time. They want me to write a note to Ma, telling her she had to work against the county splitting if she ever wants to see me.”

“And you wouldn’t write it.”

She shook her head, stubbornly.

His arm around her tightened. “Good girl,” he said.

From the room below a voice bellowed at them. “Better come down, Johnny. We got the whole house covered.”

Harrison’s hand tightened on the six-gun and he glanced at the girl.

“Go to hell,” said Harrison. “If you want me, come and get me.”

“Good boy,” said Carolyn, with a smile.

In the room below a six-gun bellowed and a bullet smashed into the wall opposite the staircase. Harrison waited. The six-gun roared again and splinters leaped from the paneling of the wall.

Silence … deep and deadly silence. Then all at once something scraped outside, a sliding, grating noise.

Carolyn gasped. “A ladder! Someone’s putting a ladder up to one of the windows!”

Harrison half turned toward the room from which had come the scraping noise, and then turned back. Black defeat welled within his brain. Licked, he told himself. Licked right down to the ground. Boxed in so he couldn’t move. If he left the stairway to get at the men on the ladder, the gang downstairs would charge up and get him and if he waited here, the ladder-men would nail him.

Silence again … and then the silence was broken by a steady creaking, the protest of the ladder at the weight of a man upon it … a man who was climbing fast.

“Carolyn,” said Harrison, huskily. “Carolyn, I …”

His words were drowned out by a human scream, a soaring note of pain and terror. And cutting through the scream came the distant spat of a high power rifle. The rifle spat again, an angry sound thinned by distance … and then again. Another man screamed shortly, as if the scream had started and then someone had grabbed him by the throat.

Carolyn was staring at him with wide eyes. “It’s the men out at the ladder,” she cried. “Someone is shooting at …”

He jerked erect and grabbed her by the wrist.

“Come on,” he shouted.

He charged across the hall and into the room where the ladder had been placed. At the window, he saw that the ladder still was there, planted against the house, while at its foot two dead men lay, one spread-eagled on the ground where the bullet had stretched him, the other huddled grotesquely where he had fallen from the rungs.

He glanced upward at the towering cliff. The gun, he knew, must be up there on that cliff … the gun that had driven all of Dunham’s men to cover.

Feet were pounding up the stairs and Harrison switched around. With one hand, he shoved Carolyn away, toward one corner of the room. In a single leap, he reached the doorway of the room.

His gun spat fire as a man’s head and shoulders came into sight around the corner of the staircase, the hammer of the weapon shaking the tiny room like a thunderclap. The head and shoulders slammed against the railing and slid out of sight. Someone yelled and feet were going down the stairway, not coming up.

“Quick!” Harrison yelled at Carolyn. “Get out of the window and go down that ladder.”

She hesitated, crouching in the corner of the room.

“Hurry!” he shouted at her. “While there’s light whoever’s on the cliff can cover us and the light won’t hold for long.”

With one long stride, he was at the window, jerking it open.

“Here,” he said, and reaching out an arm, boosted her roughly through the sash.

“Hold on tight,” he whispered. “But hurry, hurry …”

Terror was in her eyes as she looked up at him, but she moved swiftly, sure footed down the rungs. Carolyn had reached the bottom of the ladder and was running, heading for the shadows that lay like a rumpled blanket at the foot of the towering cliffs.

Recklessly, Harrison hurled himself down the ladder in great leaps. From a clump of grass to his left a six-gun opened up with a hacking cough and somewhere to the right a rifle talked with measured tones. He heard the hum of lead spinning past him, heard the sullen chugging of the bullets in the house, felt the twitch of jerking hands that wrenched at his vest and shirt.

Then he was stumbling, falling headlong, throwing up his arms to shield his face from the ground that was rushing at him. Far up the cliff the hidden rifle churned. Harrison clawed blindly to his feet and ran, ran with head bent low and with shoulders hunched, ran with a mind that forced him on.

The edge of the shadow at the cliff was close … he was almost there … and that’s King’s X, his tired mind told him. The shadow is King’s X. Once you get there no bullet can touch you … none of those buzzing little bees whimpering in the grass and whining overhead.

Something moved in the shadow ahead of him. Carolyn! Carolyn, coming toward him!

“Go back!” he croaked. “Go back!”

A dark form rose out of the grass and clutched at the girl with ape-like arms. Harrison tried to scream a warning, but all that came out of his throat was a rasping sound. He half-raised his gun and something sliced across his skull, something that was a streak of light tumbling into blackness, something that was a whirling pinball of flaming red. And he was falling, tumbling head over heels into an inky pit.

He groped back out of the darkness, revived. His head was a throbbing pulse that rose and fell, that swelled and then collapsed. Slowly he moved one of his hands and put it to his head. It came away wet and sticky.

The first star was twinkling in the east and the haze was bluer, almost black. Harrison lay on his back, thoughts surging through his pulsing head.

He had been hit by a bullet as he’d raced from the house, as he’d raised his gun to shoot at the man who had risen out of the grass beside Carolyn.

His lips moved. “Carolyn,” they said. “Carolyn …”

But it was all over now. Back in the office Dunham had laughed at him and said the bluff had run out. And now it had. Despite …

The rifle on the cliff! Someone had been up there. Someone still might be around. One gun that would not be raised against him.

Hope flared and then almost flickered out. One gun against the valley. He shook his head slowly. It simply wouldn’t work.

His own gun? Carefully he hunted for it. But there was no gun, nothing but the grass. It must have fallen from his hand when he had been hit, probably had gone tumbling for many feet before it came to rest.

A faint rustling came to his ears and he tensed. The rustling came on. Carefully, he rolled over, got to his knees and waited. His hands clenched tight, then opened, clenched again. Bare hands, he thought. Bare hands are all I have.

A voice called softly. “Johnny!”

Carolyn! Carolyn calling for him. Swiftly an answer came to his lips and then it died, for there was another sound, the sound of the men that he had forgotten. Boots coming through the grass, heading straight toward him.

“Over this way,” said one voice and he recognized it as that of the man who had worn the blue mask back there on the road when the three had stopped him yesterday. Was it only yesterday? Enough had happened for a lifetime.

A voice growled at the blue mask man. “You’re loco, all you heard was just the wind.”

“It was a voice,” the man said stubbornly. “Sounded like the girl.”

“It wasn’t Harrison,” said the other one. “Spike got him. Didn’t you, Spike?”

“Sure,” said the third voice. “Had a feeling when I saw him coming up the road this afternoon that I’d have to shoot him. Shoot him then and save a lot of trouble.”

Cautiously, Harrison lifted his head, saw the three bearing down upon him, saw that the tall man in the center was the blue mask man, the man who had jerked his thumb when Westman had asked him if the boss was in.

“Nice horse you took from him,” said the second man.

“Damn fool just picketed him out, then walked away and left him.”

“Seems as how,” declared Spike, “a man like that don’t deserve a horse.”

Harrison’s hands clenched into fists and his body tightened. His head was clearer, but it still was jumpy and his body was one vast dull ache.

Nothing to fight with … and yet he had to fight. It was stark madness … one man with nothing but his hands against three armed men. His mind went back to Carolyn, crouching somewhere back there in the grass. Thank Lord, he told himself, she’s heard them, too, and is keeping quiet.

He counted as they came, counting footsteps as they came. One, two, and one, two and one, two. They were no more than three paces away and that was close enough. Almost too close. Almost …

He heaved himself out of the grass, rising like a fighting grizzly rearing on his legs when he finally is cornered, and from his throat ripped out an involuntary cry …

His legs drove him forward in a surging leap and his right fist came whizzing from his boot-tops even as he sprang. A fist that was aimed with deadly accuracy at the blue-mask man.

For an instant, in the twilight, he saw their blank stares, the jaws that dropped with astonishment, then the hurried, instinctively pistoning of hands for gunbutts.

The blue-mask man started to duck, but he moved too late. Harrison’s fist caught him beneath the jaw, snapped back his head with its brutal power, lifted him clear off his feet.

Like a cat, Harrison pivoted, saw Spike’s leering face before him, saw the gun come flashing up, knew that he’d never beat the bullet.

“Got you.…” jeered Spike, and then the gurgle stopped him, the gurgle that came into his throat, the soft splat! of steel on flesh that sent him reeling back. Staggering, he dropped his gun and his hands went to his throat, grasping for the knife hilt that stood out against his neck.

Like a plummet, Harrison dived for Spike’s dropped gun, half stumbling as he scooped it out of the grass, half by feel, half by luck.

The one remaining man of the bandit trio was dropping the six-gun for a snap shot and in something that was almost panic, Harrison squeezed the trigger of the gun he had scooped up.

The revolver in front of him gushed fire, but the gun in his own fist was dancing in his grasp. The man in front of him staggered back on fighting heels, gun arm coming up above his head. Back and back he stumbled and with grim ferocity, with a dull red anger, Harrison kept the trigger working, slamming bullet after bullet into the sagging body.

“Him all over dead,” said a quiet sing-song voice out of the twilight. “No use to shoot him more.”

Harrison let the gun drop to his side and swung around.

“Sing Lee!” he shouted.

“Come to pick up missy,” explained the Chinese cook. “Take along a knife just in case.”

“Then that was you,” said Harrison. “That was you who stopped her from running back.”

“That was me,” said Sing Lee.

“I damn near shot you,” Harrison told him.

He moved forward slowly. “Where is Carolyn? Where is …”

Then he saw her, standing to one side of Sing Lee. He strode toward her, but Sing Lee put out a hand and stopped him.

“We run like hell,” he said. “Men hear shots and come.”

Harrison glanced quickly over his shoulder, saw that the cook was right. Men were coming … and not men on foot this time, but mounted men, sweeping in toward them with their horses at a dead run.

“No time to run!” gasped Harrison. “We have to stand and fight. Get down! Get down in the grass and hide!”

He leaped back toward Spike’s dead form, unfastened his cartridge belt. With trembling fingers, he fed new shells into the six-gun.

On one knee, Harrison brought up the gun, leveled it deliberately and fired. One of the foremost riders jerked stiffly, sailed out of the saddle. Six-guns cracked and the horses swung, fighting their bits, rearing, skidding around. Bullets chunked into the ground and the air whined with their whisper overhead. Dirt struck Harrison across the face as a slug plowed ground at his very feet. Swiftly he worked the trigger.

Out of the darkness behind him came the angry spat of a high power rifle, a hacking, angry rifle that talked in measured tones, unhurried, deliberate, vindictive.

Then there were other rifles and the shouts of men charging in, closing upon the milling horses of the bandit band.

The six-gun clicked on an empty shell and Harrison reached for the belt lying at his feet. A fitful flash flared through the twilit gloom … a flash that was not gunfire. Harrison jerked up his head, let the gun fall from his hands.

Flames were curling from the houses, flames that crawled and leaped and climbed into the sky. The firing had died down and across the grassland that lay between him and the houses, Harrison could hear the crackle of the flames.

Slowly, stiffly, he stood up, drew in a deep breath of air.

A tall figure stalked out of the gloom toward him, rifle slung across his arm.

“Wal,” said Trapper Bill, “I guess that polishes off the varmints. All we had to do was sort of hole up and hold out until Ma got that note.”

Harrison gasped. “What note?”

“Why the note that Sing Lee wrote her. Damn smart Chinaman, Sing Lee. Told you he was taking up reading and writing, didn’t I?”

“Sure. But how did Sing Lee …”

“Just sort of lifted that paper you was carrying in your pocket,” explained Trapper. “Figured maybe it was something I should know about. So I took it when you was a-snoozing and loped over to have Sing Lee take a look at it.”

“But there wasn’t nothing on it.”

“Sure, there was. Sing Lee held it up to the light. Said it was the funniest writing he ever run across.”

“So you left a note for Ma and then came on, the two of you. That was you up on the cliff.”

“Dang tooting,” said Trapper. “Sure kept them all denned up.”

Grass rustled and Harrison swung about. Carolyn was running toward him with Sing Lee behind her. Swiftly, Harrison stepped forward, caught the girl close. She huddled against him for comfort.

“All done in,” said Trapper.

“Missy all right,” said Sing Lee. “Just happy, that’s all.”

Horses swept toward them, pulled to a stop. Ma Elden climbed down stiffly from the saddle, waddled toward the group, fingers hauling out the makings from her shirt pocket.

“Everybody all right?” she demanded.

“Everybody here,” Sing Lee told her in his high sing-song. “Everybody happy.”

“I’m plumb glad of that,” said Ma. “Some other folks ain’t. We got Dunham tied up and we found Haynes where he shouldn’t be, so we just gathered him in to be on the safe side. Westman got away, but the boys still are hunting for him.”

She snapped a match across her thumb, held up the light so she could look at Harrison.

“Well,” she asked, “ain’t you got a thing to say?”

“Was wondering,” said Harrison, “if you’d still loan me that money to buy out the store.”

“Bet your boots,” said Ma.

She lit the cigarette, puffed thoughtfully.

“Maybe,” she said, “we could make it a double wedding. Me and Hatless figure on getting hitched some time, and this is as good a time as any.”

THE END